The Scream franchise is not one that wants to be taken seriously as a straight horror film. From the first iconoclastic installment so many years ago, its aim, it’s very raison d’être, was to call out the conventions of slasher films and then serve up a gory slashfest to an audience primed to laugh at… Read More »
INFINITY POOL
With INFINITY POOL Brandon Cronenberg continues his father’s great tradition of unsettling images and quasi-familiar realities. He diverges in that, for all the normalization of the disquieting, in that he fails to evince the same undertone impish glee at the macabre so evident in even the elder Mr. Cronenberg’s darkest works. Still, he… Read More »
BLACK ADAM
Until now, BATMAN VS SUPERMAN has been the nadir of DC’s excursions into cinema. Now it has lost even that paltry distinction with the onset of BLACK ADAM, a film with much sound and fury that signifies nothing. Not even Dwayne Johnson, one of the most charismatic movie stars working today can right this shipwreck,… Read More »
FIRE OF LOVE
Dosa infuses her story with a dash of the mythic, honoring her subjects who came to see volcanoes in mythic terms despite being rigorous scientists. There is more here than can be explained in merely factual terms.
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
Click here for the flashback interview with David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen for EASTERN PROMISES. With CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, David Cronenberg once again presents us with a dystopian future, or is it an alternate present, that is alien and yet, somehow, instantly familiar. It’s not just the machines that mimic the skeletal structures of… Read More »
ON THE COUNT OF THREE
Jerrod Carmichal is a quietly compelling presence in his directorial debut, ON THE COUNT OF THREE. As Val, half of a suicidal duo out to make the last day of their lives count for something, or at least to make it a day less depressing than the ones that have so far rounded out their… Read More »
HOUSE OF GUCCI
HOUSE OF GUCCI is a ramshackle accretion of muddled plots studded with oddly incoherent character development and performances that range from stock (Al Pacino) to enigmatic (Adam Driver). This overlong effort takes a tale of sex, money, and power among the super rich and renders it into a dull slog brightened only by Lady Gaga’s… Read More »
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE
For all the meticulous detail in THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE about the early life of Tammy Faye Bakker, this biopic about the rise of fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker has an ending that is curiously sparse. It’s not just Tammy Faye’s second marriage to Roe Messner that is erased, though he does… Read More »
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Flames are never far from Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), starting with those lapping near, but not too near, his heels as he exits the house that he’s just set alight over the body he’s deposited beneath the floorboards. In Guillermo del Toro’s oneiric vision of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Notice, too, the… Read More »
ANTLERS
I don’t know that I subscribe to the idea that there are some works of prose that are “unfilmable.” This is not to say that a successsful translation from one art form to another doesn’t require a certain amount of compromise around the source material. Prose, while relying on the eyes in order to absorb… Read More »
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